Is it a flower? A back-scratcher for use in some gargantuan shower? The severed limb of a creature with a fetish for chain-link jewellry? (I think that’s it for my free-association work.)
I cnanot think of anything deep to say about this one, except that it represents a day spent at home not doing much. This is a variable time of year; in mid-April in some other years I have been in Ljubljana, Melbourne and Windhoek, but this year all the spring travelling is already done.
So I’m trying to work this one out. Did someone simply not bother to overpaint, or remove, the entire sign? Or was the original commission a misunderstanding, and Kirklees County Council fully intended to warn drivers and others that around the corner they might encounter one or more specimens of Equus zebra? Inquiring minds want to know.
A trip out to the suburbs today: definitely not the former Communist blocks, more like leafy Hampstead or Carshalton (if this were London). Streets named after composers, big gardens and garages, that kind of thing. One thing I like about Berlin is that it’s all quite laid back: it certainly doesn’t have the over-energised manicness of some capital cities. Perhaps this shot captures that.
Berlin is where we’ve come for a few days. This part of it has been much changed in the last 36 years, for up until 1989, the Berlin Wall ran right through here: there is a marker on the road near this point, with the former Checkpoint Charlie (now a magnet for tourists and hustlers alike) just off shot to the right: though this was only a small and relatively insignificant part of the border infrastructure at this point on Friedrichstrasse. Nowadays these displays of photographs and maps are all that remain. The Wall retains such a significant place in the memory of people my age (and I’m not even German) but it only lasted 28 and a bit years (August 1961 – October 1989): Joe will be that age soon enough.
On 23rd March 2026, nothing happened. At least not to me anyway. Down there in town a blue truck parks itself in that gap we perceive in the buildings and offers something to look at. And so I get through another day.
Although not as mild as it has been, today felt like one of those Sundays where it was perfectly permissible to take it easy. And in my local area, there are worse places to do this than down by — or in these guys’ case, on — the canal.
I know my sister Vicki follows this blog, so let me say that it was, as always, nice to see them in Hebden Bridge tonight. This is a picture of her and Pete (the tattoos are the giveaway) and not one of a Thai corn ball, even though that does form the foreground.
For the second time in a week Bradford proves a decent choice for an evening out, even if it was a little wet, and the city can continue to ascend the rankings of Most Depicted Places on the blog, a list on which it now rises to 9th (see the stats). It is one of those northern towns which celebrated its Victorian wealth, here based on wool, by building a magnificent municipal headquarters of the kind no local authority or government would dare to risk now, for fear of being slagged off for misuse of public funds. But why not do it this way? Works for me.
Being 42 